Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Just Friday | Nov 28, 2008 11:14

Much as I feel I should comment meaningfully on the grim news abroad, this week has been enough of a struggle as it is. The seriousness is not within me. So, if I promise to resist the temptation to make non-medical use of my cough syrup, will you bear with me?

And anyway, there's the 2008 Public Address Word of the Year to keep you busy.

Mr Litterick celebrates the second anniversary of The Fundy Post as a blog by finding a little slice of my own publishing history. It appears I was banging on about teh internets way back in 1994.

Further abroad amongst the readership, Giovanni hid a $5 note in a blog post and you have to find it and claim it.

One of the nice things about the build-up to the Headless Chickens' return show at the Powerstation tonight has been a series of good interviews. Chris Matthews really is very droll. He and Fiona Macdonald were good value on Radio New Zealand recently, and the interview with Chris and Michael Lawry in the Herald this week is also a lot of fun.

Speaking of Radio NZ, if you missed Sam Coley's Music 101 documentary Bowie's Waiata -- which, exactly 25 years on, tells the story of David Bowie's visit to Takapuwahia Marae in Porirua -- you can hear it here. It's a wonderful, heartwarming piece of work that happens to contain a previously unheard Bowie composition -- the song he wrote to respond to his welcome on the marae.

NB: I've struck an odd problem with the music on-demand content on Radio NZ that doesn't seem to affect the other on-demand content -- something to do with source-filtering at the ISP level. Nothing will play the streams except for VLC Player, which ignores the error message and soldiers on. So if you want to hear Bowie's Waiata but it won't play, right-click here to copy the .asx URL, choose "open network" from the file menu in VLC, and paste it in there.

Insofar as a recession can generate good news stories, I think this is one. Little Brother is closing is own retail outlets in a difficult trading environment -- but will have a branded presence in every Barkers store in the country.

And, finally, see what you think of this ... I could have had some freebie product to link to it, but I'll pass on that and just link to it anyway. I'm told the person who gave permission for the use of the words is more than happy with the result. Personally, I think the first part of the promotion is a really lovely idea, and the second is, well, an advertisement.

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The smart thing to do | Nov 27, 2008 10:58

The Herald's editorial witters on for a few hundred words but eventually gets there. The Listener's editorial is unusually direct and well-informed on the matter. Rod Oram, as usual, knows what he's talking about. And Brian Fallow ably conveys the concerns of the business sector.

Their common topic is the range of problems created by John Key's granting of the Act Party's wish for a show-stopping "review" of the Emissions Trading Scheme. As Oram notes, the granting of that wish represented National's first explicitly broken campaign promise: it had been pledging all year to let the ETS go forward, but to quickly amend what it saw as the scheme's flaws.

It was reasonable of National to want to conclude negotiations on support agreements in time for John Key to undertake an important round of official foreign engagements. But with Act playing hardball, dispatch has begun to look like haste. Act rejected the offer of two Cabinet posts, which would have smacked too much of accepting responsibility. It wanted policy trophies.

There has been one immediate consequence of this concession to Act. And, ironically, it has become manifest on the very diplomatic tour that hastened it. The ditching of the ETS has undermined New Zealand's carbon credibility, and made difficult for us to argue our own virtue in the face of Britain's proposed new departure taxes. Says the Herald:

A brisk reappraisal based on the current economic climate may have served a purpose, but an Act-induced agenda that includes a review of climate-change science smacks of unnecessary dawdling. Europe and most of the rest of the word have moved on. President-elect Barack Obama favours a cap-and-trade scheme not unlike that fashioned by the previous government. Mr Key's visit to London should have convinced him that he cannot procrastinate over modifications to this.

Any delays will diminish New Zealand's reputation in environmental matters. They will also make his tourism portfolio far more onerous.

And yet, as Fallow says:

Act's proposed terms of reference, perhaps deliberately, are a recipe for interminable further delay and uncertainty.

The committee should hear competing views on the science from internationally respected sources, it says. Apparently the careful processes of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endorsed by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society and all the other guardians of the scientific method, are not good enough.

A few New Zealand MPs are more likely to get to the bottom of it.

That's laughable.

It gets even jollier when you consider that Act will pursue its agenda with the assistance of another negotiated bauble: its own slush fund. As No Right Turn points out, it's not yet clear where Act's money for commissioning its own "research" and "consultancy" will come from -- he even allows for the possibility that the National Party itself might pay the money -- but it is an unprecedented slab of political pork that Rodney Hide should be reminded about every week for the next three years.

But hey, you can do your bit. Pop on over to Don't Be a Rodney, which provides background and a letter template for citizens who wish to urge John Key to ignore the party whose charms appear to be rapidly fading, and to act in the better interests of the country by pursuing his own party's policy. Or, if the review really is locked in, to assert a design that will not allow Act to derail the issue for years. That would be the smart thing to do.

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Flu diversions | Nov 25, 2008 09:44

Is there a doctor in the house? Or, rather, someone who can verify the widely-held belief that if you're busy, your body will hold off getting sick until you ease up?

On Friday evening, having knocked off the second Media7 show in a week, I was looking forward to a week to come when I would not have to get tarted up for the cameras. I could relax. On Saturday evening, having had people around me dropping like flies for weeks, I started to come down with the flu. Swollen throat, coughing, chills, hot flushes, the full bouquet.

Still, can't moan. I sat down with Jimmy yesterday afternoon to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still, which he had hired in order to prepare for the impending 2008 remake, starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu and John Cleese Professor Barnhardt.

It was nice to be reminded why it is regularly named amongst the greatest science fiction films, and the black and white transfer to DVD was a pleasure to watch. And if it's hard not to feel some trepidation about the "reimagination", it's still fascinating to weigh the differences between the 1951 and 2008 films.

The former emerges from, and is a critique of, 1950s anti-communist paranoia in America -- and also has a Jesus figure in Klaatu. In 2008, Keane's Klaatu is a greenie: his beef with humanity is not its aggression but its careless use of a planet with the "rare ability to sustain complex life". The director says Klaatu, his robot buddy Gort and the ship they flew in were conceived as a Trinity.

In the evening, we watched the 90-minute premiere of the BBC's remake (contains spoilers) of the 1975 series Survivors, which screened in Britain on Sunday night.

The original Survivors, the creation of Terry Nation (who also conceived the Daleks) stands proud in the post-apocalyptic tradition of British sci-fi, even if it did tail away markedly when Nation left after the first series, along with Carolyn Seymour (who lately has quite a career as a voice actor in your kids' video games).

It's intriguing to see how it has been reinvented. Middle-class wife Abby Grant still meets the resourceful Greg Preston, but Preston is black now. Indeed, the whole cast is multi-hued (Freema Agyeman!), and it's clear that a reconciliation with Islam will be part of one character's development.

The mystery "flu" virus (yes, it's a slightly unnerving watch when you actually have the flu) is no longer spilled during the programme titles by a clumsy, nameless Chinese scientist: it sweeps the world as "the European flu", while the British government lies to its people until there can be no more lying.

But there's a pretty clear steer at the end of the premiere that this is no mere mutation, but a human folly -- which I personally found a bit depressing. The point of the series is that everything is done and must be rebuilt by the few hands that remain. If there are to be malign scientists who still have the electricity on, then that rather changes the vibe.

But anyway, even without the English rose allure of Lucy Fleming, it's worth seeing. Perhaps you could ask your Friends in England to send it to you. It hardly seems likely to screen here in anything resembling a timely fashion.

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New on Poneke: Harvard physicist speculates that forces from the future may have stopped the world's biggest scientific experiment.

And, as part of an undertaking to myself to post more often at Humans, some thoughts on Finn Higgins and other things.

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